Tortured Ghosts
by Sleydo
Summary: [Takeshi Kovacs novels fic, Woken Furies sequel] When the Envoys fail to put down the revolution brewing on Harlan's World, the Protectorate resorts to a new and untested form of enforcer.


I awoke in the sleeve a few hours after sunrise.

Needlecast downloads are primly scheduled on Harlan's World. The Martian orbitals can have this way of messing with the hyperspace 'cast and when it comes to digitized-human transmissions it's not always easy for the AIs to spot the transcript errors. Midnight's generally accepted as the best bet. After that, about 9 hours in the strange disembodied limbo of pre-consciousness as I assembled myself. No dreams, or at least I can't remember any. Occasionally, when I try to remember, Envoy recall can supply me with a twisting, fractal pattern of endless chains that's never quite the same as the last time I remembered it. Some variation of what in non-Envoys would be a Kluver constant, a neural pattern representative of the constellations of low-level brain structure that map out persona and being.

I came into being like smoke forming the shape of a human face.

I found myself already awake and moving. Envoy conditioning snapped taut wires of control across the gaping holes between motive and motor control, tying tight tourniquets to shut down the symptoms that normally plagued the newly-sleeved. I might have stumbled half a step in the first few moments of my existence in this body, but it was unnoticeable amongst the crowd.

The sleeve had been walking down one of the major thoroughfares. Crowds of people all around, moving half with clear purpose and half in diffusive motion, energized by the endless stream of advertising casts across every spectrum from pheromone to t-ray. The broad street the crowd mingled through was girded on either side with towers that ran like highways into the sky, air traffic swooping endlessly between skywalks and skyscrapers with vertigo-inducing speed. Yet there was a sense of muted choreography to it all, in the patterns of the air cars and the unexpected grace in which the people stepped into and back out of each other's way, as if they'd rehearsed it earlier before performing it for me now. Far above, at the height of the air traffic, holographic advertising and news displays flickered schizophrenically between product ideograms and human beings that performed for them like puppet masters, who looked down on us all with the vacant yet beatific expressions of gods. Something deep in me woke up, connecting and parsing stimuli, and filled me with a heady mixture of sensation. Unfamiliar and unwelcome sights and smells wove together from signal noise to mosiac, and points of exploitation-_body language shows emotional vulnerability...excellent sniping position on the left apartment rooftop-_perked up at me from everywhere like the ends of frayed threads. My Envoy conditioning-sometimes like a weaponized shell around my self, sometimes like a maglev rail that pulled me along my assigned path-had apparently not lost step with me in the crowd.

This was not quite the capital city; New Sarajevo hadn't been built anywhere near close enough to appropriate economic centres or militarily strategic geography. Instead it was a sort of playground for the very rich, built right in the middle of one of the orbitals' blind spots, where they couldn't fire. Not quite where the colonial freighters had crashed generations ago, but close enough for a couple memorial statues. Only here could Harlan's World support any form of air traffic. Everywhere else the orbitals shot down virtually anything that flew. The Martians have been dead for longer than humanity has existed, but their machinery remains, and on Harlan's World their satellites jealously guarded the privilege of flight with cold and murderous fury for centuries.

I picked my way through the sleeve's most recent memories, and let them pull me along the thoroughfare. Until I'd awoken the sleeve had belonged to one Liu Takahashi, a higher-up DeCom mercenary now acting as bodyguard/retainer for one of Harlan's spoiled aristocrat children. He had several brain augments meant for long-range wireless communications with DeCom recon teams, but he'd been low on cash until this gig, and the augs' firmware hadn't been updated for some time.

Opportunities like that don't come often. He was an obvious candidate for the viral upload.

Even now, 300 years after we built a black box for the human brain and figured out how to save souls as digital constructs, we haven't augmented our real selves all that much. Yes, you can have a sleeve with rattlesnake genes in your eyes for IR night vision and gecko microspikes on your fingers to climb headlong up the sides of featureless steel buildings. You can jack your soul into a synthetic body with graphene tendons and built-in fusion cores and the ability to eject antimatter from your hands. And of course everybody in the whole damn galaxy gets a cortical stack: A featureless grey pill that gets slotted in just under your medulla oblongata and records enough of your brain activity to recover your self after death. Barring a violent enough death to destroy the stack, a digital copy of your soul can be recovered and resleeved-reinserted into a new body-and behold: Lazarus rises again.

But for all that, our minds never really changed. It's mostly still just Cro-Magnon minds, barely evolved for the savannah plain, but with shoes and hyperspace needlecasts and sentient evolving nanoware to keep us company.

Everyone except the Envoys.

Any government that can call itself a government, fundamentally, requires the right and capability to be more violent than its civilians or any aggressive neighbors-that's been true for as long as we've been human. The Protectorate was no different. But its needs were unique in human history. It could beam information across the spiral arm by plumbing the depths of higher-order dimensions-hyperspace needlecasts-but physical objects were left to take the slow, sublight route. If any colony world ever decided to cede, and the Protectorate lost the planetside war with whatever loyalist troops it had stationed there, it would be forced to send ships. Might take hundreds of years in some cases.

That's no way to run an intergalactic civilization.

You need to win the secession war before anyone even knows it starts-that or win impossible wars with almost no resources. You need counterintelligence capabilities well beyond the mean capacities of the baseline humans you're fighting, because you have to completely outclass the baselines. You need regime engineers-something very different than soldiers or armies. Something that can manipulate and empathize through a synthetic emotion and conviction that resembles sociopathy, draw impossible extrapolations on marginal or no data with unerring accuracy...predict, subvert, manipulate, murder, betray. You need total superiority, like an antibody disassembling a cancer from the inside out.

And it's not bodies you're freighting into the combat zone, it's _minds_. Whatever bodies those souls are dropped into on the other side, that's what they have to work with. It's not about building a superior body. It's about building a mind that uses the existing biological machinery in a vastly more effective way than what stepped out of the savannah and into space. It's about building a superior class of consciousness, or at least the parcel of memories and personality that get packaged neatly into a digitized human and shipped across space that you might poetically refer to as a _soul_.

The Envoy Corps is a military force of posthumans. The recruits are mostly taken in from conventional military services-helps mitigate potential loyalty issues, one rogue Envoy is more than enough trouble for any planet-and our minds are disassembled inside a virtual construct. They put us back together rather differently than when we came in.

When it comes to the most basic change, the best term is _differently conscious_, or maybe even _hyperconscious. _Our minds are institutions, to an extent: thousands of subroutine employees and instruments whirring away with the lonely executive homunculus that is your consciousness at the top of the chain, an iceberg resting on an ocean of subsystems. With baselines, it's often arguable that 'they' aren't entirely in control at all. Reports come in, decisions get made, the self-aware monkey at the top of the pyramid rubber stamps everything before it goes out. Envoy conditioning throws most of that out the window. Mental discipline and self-control that began with the semi-religious disciplines practiced in Asiatic cultures for centuries, toned and rarefied with cognitive and neuroscientific innovations that gives the soul a new lease on the body. Total control, when necessary, over the underlying subroutines in an impossibly unstable framework, held together by a level of self discipline that makes Envoys capable of stopping their own hearts. It leaves us capable of taking intuitive leaps that would make any savant detective of baseline human history proud, of assimilating contextual data fast enough to adapt to entirely new worlds and cultures within days of awakening, with total recall, with reflex and muscle coordination that breaks every baseline record with ease, almost complete resistance to a variety of psychoactive drugs...

If it wasn't for the fact the Protectorate also burns out every conditioned or genetic barrier against committing violence, ex-Envoys would probably be highly valued in any colony worlds we visited, rather than barred from holding any position above menial.

But I digress.

Liu's client was an even hundred or so meters away, some second cousin offshoot of Mitzi Harlan's genealogy that made them important enough for a bodyguard or two. Liu's role was meant to be covert enough to let them go about their day. I hanged backwards a little ways more from the client, maybe a hundred ten meters.

It was a nice day. The sun blotted out the motion of the air cars above until they hurt to look at. The puppet motions of the cast actors far beyond that, still rhapsodizing at nothing.

From above, the whirring of an aircar motor, suddenly slammed into overdrive. Some otherwise ubiquitous Harkany Systems ride dove out of the flow of traffic and came downwards like a missile.

It was a missile.

The beginnings of surprise from the crowd, but in the end there wasn't even time for anyone to respond. Least of all the Harlan aristo Liu was supposed to be guarding. I dove for cover under the press of bodies, managing to cover my ears before the eardrum-shattering pressure wave from the crash.

When I got up again, it was terrible carnage. Bodies, whole and broken, tossed and littered like fragments of paper. Screams and wails from all around. The aircar itself was almost intact-_they build those things tough, don't they-_but the driver had had a running start of about half a kilometer of vertical distance and had managed to reach a sizable fraction of terminal velocity before they'd hit. The car's front was busted to fragments the size of my hand, and the driver's cabin was unrecognizable. Charred remnants of a body inside, barely enough to draw even a DNA sample. Let alone a cortical stack.

Good.

I let my Envoy conditioning draw in the sea of human suffering and incomprehension around me. I let it pull me under, add shellshocked latency to my movements. I moved away from the epicentre, gave myself a moment to draw in the sight, and then surged back towards the wounded, running on adrenaline and a building synthesized rage. The nearest was missing an arm; Liu's reflexes pulled his shirt apart and began to fashion a tourniquet.

I turned Liu's head back to the shocked, unharmed elements of the aristo crowd behind me. They'd backed away with the jittery fear of those truly unused to violence.

"The hell are you doing!" I barked. "Help me!"

It was a full three hours before Aiura showed up. Extrapolations on prior behavior and presumed location had put her at between one hour and four; even if she didn't we'd run the scam again some other time. She should have been sending lackeys, or just left the situation to AI constructs while she parsed and interpreted to her masters in some incognito location halfway across the globe away from the hot zones. But then, there didn't seem to be anywhere anymore that wasn't a hot zone as far as the Quellists were concerned. And 'hands-on' was hardcoded into Aiura's profile; you didn't need Envoy intuition to know that anyone who executed dissidents in person liked to have a first-person perspective.

We'd had enough data to figure it would work. And we wouldn't be sacrificing anything much. For the first time in the Protectorate's history, Envoys had become expendable to an extent.

I caught a shadow of her glance in the crowd from where I was perched, on one of the police vans, in the middle of a debrief. Features borrowed and engineered from the segment of the Harlan's World ancestors that would have been called Japanese back on earth, at least nearly a millennium ago. Subtle, subdued declarations of authority in the cut of cheekbones and the cold grey eyes; it's been a few hundred years now but Harlan's World culture doesn't forget too easily that it was originally colonized by yakuza and upper-class _Tokugawa_ with Slavic Europeans as indentured labor.

I reached out with Liu's implants and touched hers. Wireless feed flickered through my consciousness like synesthesia. Handshake protocols and brief queries and missives. One or two encryption keys that had been added to my unconscious memories when I'd downloaded, more serial numbers to confirm manufacturer and product authenticity than anything else.

_Envoy consciousness. Protectorate enforcer. _

Aiura didn't look in my direction, but when the wireless cut out I saw some of the tendons in her neck tense, ever so slightly, at her use of an internal tannoy.

One of the police machines rose and unfolded. A synth voice said, "Please follow me, Takahashi-_san_."

Aiura was waiting for me, head tilted, arms folded, whole body tilted ever so slightly. There was a dancer's poise to the movements, engineered elegance and probably some utilitarian combat neurochemical augmentations lying in wait behind it.

She spoke in old Japanese, at least one of the few unbastardised offshoots that hadn't mingled with the rough hodgepodge and creole stew of Eurasian languages into some breed of Stripjap.

"Takahashi-_san_. I understand that you were witness to this event. Will you please come with me."

Theatre for the presumed audience. An Envoy deployment didn't often give warning to a planet's rulers that the Protectorate was no longer satisfied with their effectiveness, and in any case anything up to the Martian orbitals themselves could be compromised and listening in. We wouldn't talk until we were somewhere shielded.

Aiura's aircar was carefully crafted. Alt-cedar, synthetic organisms grown into a functioning machine. Of their own accord, the doors folded apart and then sealed us in together.

Aiura settled in beside me, face impassive. She didn't give much away, but her body language and pheromones slightly betrayed sudden relief. Finally, she and her aristo masters had received more support from on high. Minutes went by before Aiura was willing to speak. I waited in silence.

"This is unlooked-for so early. I am pleased to see the Protectorate has responded to these events with such alacrity. You have been briefed, I take it?"

"The situation can be roughly described as _critical_, as I understand it." I'd followed her into old-school Japanese. I held out my hand for her to shake. "You can call me Jack."

Aiura hesitated a moment, then shook it firmly. "Welcome to Harlan's World, Jack."

I watched the world go by through the windshield. I'd been feeling my way through the DeCom artifice that I shared cranium space with since the aircar crash. The transmission software encoded on top of it, originally an engram in my subconscious, had unfolded and differentiated into a functional structure. It was automated, somewhat like a reflex, so I relaxed enough to let it run its course and focused on the conversation.

I squeezed her hand briefly, then let go.

"If only this could have been resolved earlier," I said, eyes on some abstracted point beyond the horizon.

Aiura let out a long, slow breath. "Konrad Harlan wishes that the UN council on Earth understand the extreme nature of these events. We apologize sincerely for allowing them to escape our control. But they would test the resources of the entire Protectorate."

I snorted. "They're about to, Aiura." There was something in me that reveled in the freedom of expression I had, in the usual power balance on Harlan's World suddenly inverted with Aiura deferent and cowed. "The needle casts are going to be decommissioned in short order, for a start. Nothing human is getting transmitted in or out of Harlan's World."

"And _in_human?"

"We don't even know if the orbitals communicate with other Martian AIs at all. There's some classified research involving jamming methods, still needs some work. R&D say maybe decades. We'll just have to get the situation under control as fast as we can, and hope the orbitals are as unresponsive as they ever were."

Aiura sighed. "I." Stopped. Restarted. "I am glad that..." She pursed her lips, frowned, tried again to enunciate. I tilted my head as if confused.

"Aiura-_san..._?"

"Forgive me, a moment if-" she stopped, lapsed briefly into English-"if you would please-" Through the gestalt of her body language and involuntary movements I watched the topology of her mind shift and stutter, like the power being cut to a city and the lights shutting down district by district.

"Relax," I murmured. "You'll be back when we don't need you. Just let go for a while."

Her eyes flickered into sudden awareness. Her mouth shaped the beginnings of a word.

_Poison?_

I waited for the indications of voluntary motion to die before I spoke. Aiura's head lolled towards the window. Skyscrapers streaked past it.

"Hardly. Or, yes, of a sort. I'm more of a virus, really."

I wasn't the first Envoy deployed on Harlan's World to deal with this crisis. Hardly the first. There'd already been a deployment. A dozen Envoys deployed, full-scale by our standards. It'd gone well, at least at first. Outgoing communiqués are always sparse from deployed teams, but every sign had indicated substantial progress.

Then, they'd vanished. A few months had gone by, and it was as if reef demons had scooped them up and carried them away. No traces at all. In an operation with such magnitude of catastrophe in the event of failure, the call had gone up through the halls of the Protectorate regime and well into the highest levels of authority:

_Obsolete. _

The Envoys had _never _failed to put down a revolution before, not for the several hundred years they'd been operational. There'd been near-misses, and once we'd needed to kill a whole city, but the Protectorate as a whole had continued to exist.

Now, however: an entire team was apparently captured or killed. The Quellists, of the most dangerous revolutionary groups in the Protectorate, likely in control of an ancient fleet of alien satellites surrounding the planet. An airborne virus, released by the Quellists no doubt, which turned about 10% of its hosts into rabid killers in the presence of their aristocrat oligarchs.

Time for an upgrade.

"Your dossier was impressive. Your work as a counterespionage enforcer is practically unparalleled. We'll need your resources and network going forward. " I watched her with care as I spoke. If Aiura's consciousness was still in there, if that complex topology of electrical storms strung together across the neuronal substrate of her mind hadn't been settled and calmed into graceful nothingness by what was taking control, I saw no sign.

The Envoys were the right idea, but not taken far enough. An Envoy was a human consciousness that had been weaponised. Now, the Protectorate had taken an Envoy consciousness and made it viral.

I propagate myself through wireless transmissions, or at least it's how I got into Aiura. If a body has the right augmentations I can manufacture and spread via airborne micromachinery instead. Either way, they go to sleep less than an hour after being infected and it's someone else that wakes up several hours later.

I settled back next to her and waited for her to change.


End file.
